Sotheby’s today announced it was to sell what its specialist Peter Selley described as “the most impressive collection of English literature assembled by any British collector in the last 30 or 40 years. Certainly the finest collection of its kind that I’m aware of, unless someone has been squirrelling things away – and that’s highly unlikely.”

Selley said the collection was notable for its breadth of range and more or less all of the greats were there. “In terms of the canon of literature, from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, this is the greatest collection of its kind. Every book is a knockout.